Despite training in Company School art, traditional Kalighat pats and Ajanta cave frescoes, Lalu Prasad Shaw evolved his distinctive style to work in watercolors and oil. His teachers were some of the leading artists of the time, such as Gopal Ghose, Rathin Maitra, and Maniklal Banerjee.
In the 1970s, Shaw mastered the genre of graphics—initiated by the Society of Contemporary Artists—expressing it through the abstract form. Shaw experimented with the two-dimensional, geometric and non-figurative, as is evident in his lithographs.
Unlike his prints, Shaw’s paintings are charged with nostalgia and are object-specific. His brooding characters—men, women, and children—seem frozen into a kind of quiescent gesture; they are formal and speechless, but still expressive. Drawing from Mughal miniatures and adhering largely to profiles framed within borders along the edges, Shaw depicts faces of ordinary people, emphasizing their physical characteristics. He has also experimented with landscapes, appearing to merge the urban and rural visual in styles ranging from the minimalist to cubist-inspired. His confident use of broad blocks of colors placed harmoniously is seen here too.